VICTORIA could one day experience an earthquake as strong as the one that hit Christchurch last year, but we will always be spared the most devastating tremors.

Adam Pascale, head of the Seismology Research Centre in Victoria, said Australia will not experience a magnitude 9 earthquake - like the one that hit Japan last year - because we sit atop a stable magnetic plate.

"The overall stress around the earth around the earth is what's causing these earthquakes, but apart from that there's no correlation between these events," he said.

"There’s a potential for having a magnitude 7 or magnitude 7.5 in Australia."

Australia's geography is more stable than many other nations around the world, and our faults are generally not found near major cities.

"Christchurch wasn't actually that much bigger than this - it was a 6.1 so it's less than 10 times bigger," Mr Pascale said.

"There is a potential for having an earthquake of that magnitude in Australia. We have certainly had them in the last five to 10 years."

"The difference (in New Zealand) is that earthquake was 5km from the CBD of Christchurch, whereas this is 120km from Melbourne."

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